Tom Paine – an Englishman returned from twenty years abroad – blogs for liberty in Britain

June 2012

Wednesday, June 27, 2012

The Guardian sets out a helpful timeline of the Paul Chambers Twitter joke fiasco; the emblematic story of a butterfly being broken on a wheel by the pompous, humourless and insufferable henchmen and thugs of the British state. Read it and weep.

There is no money to meet the various obligations the state has undertaken in the name of this and future generations, but there are endless funds to pursue this idiotic prosecution. Or if there aren't, the Bank of England will quantitatively ease some into an approximation of existence adequate to fool the stupid.

More worryingly, it is clear that my inside source in the judiciary is right to tell me that the ranks of judges were stuffed during the Labour years with politically correct socialist placemen to whom there is nothing wrong - not to mention un-English and disgraceful - in deploying the full majesty of the law to punish mere words. A decent judge would have thrown the case out and flayed the police and prosecutors verbally for wasting his or her time.

The lower ranks of our judiciary are now an embarrassment to the Common Law, to the nation and to the (trust me, not-easily-embarrassed) legal professions. Let's hope the higher ranks put things to rights today.

Tuesday, June 26, 2012

This is a long discussion, but I found it fascinating. Not, you understand, that it produces any answers. It is hard to persuade people who are only familiar with living under a powerful state that there is a better alternative. They simply can't imagine it and begin to be afraid. The problem is that if we can't persuade them we are all going to get there in the worst possible way, by the uncontrolled collapse of the current system.

Friday, June 22, 2012

This brings the series of LearnLiberty.org videos that I have posted here to an end, with some closing thoughts from Dr. Ashford about the role of government and some definitions of political categories. I hope you have enjoyed the series. So which school do you belong to? Which of the various political categories, from anarchist to totalitarian, do you belong to? And which, based on what I write here, do you think I belong to?

Thursday, June 21, 2012

Wednesday, June 20, 2012

A woman was in full niqab at my local Tube station today. That I respect her right to dress as she likes, is for most libertarians all that there is to say on that subject. In truth, of course, there is much more. A wise friend of mine said recently that libertarians are wrong to treat such issues as cut and dried. We give the impression that we are uncaring, cold and more unlike other people than we really are.

This post of mine was a good example. My friend rebuked me for saying that "I don't care" if people want to enter into polygamous/polyandrous marriages, when I would actually be very concerned for any family member or friend embarking on one. He has a point. As witness the conventional lives that most of us lead, libertarians generally have a similar range of ethical scruples to everyone else. In a sense, we just have an extra scruple about interfering in the lives of others.

I would never advocate interfering with that young lady's right to dress as she does. That doesn't mean I don't have any other response. In truth my reaction was the same I would have to seeing her paraded in public on a leash. However much she and they might deny it, I feel it's degrading that her menfolk claim the right for her to be seen only by them. I feel her garb is the sign and symbol of misogynistic subjection.

Other libertarians might have different responses. We are not an army of liberty-minded robots. We are diverse, mostly rather ordinary humans with a range of views.

Why then do I feel so uncomfortable in expressing such a personal view? I am not afraid of being accused of islamophobia. As used in public discourse in Britain, I regard it as a bogus concept designed to close down discussion. Rather like racism, sexism and homophobia, it is usually no more than an incantation; a magic spell to shut opponents up.

Nor do I recognise the lady's right not to be offended. Someone is offended by any point of view. I am very offended by those who advocate enslaving their fellow-men on a time share basis; making them work for the state for months before permitting them to earn for their families. Yet I don't claim the right to suppress their foul views. There is no free speech without offence - real, imagined or bogus. Sticks and stones may break our bones, but if we want to live in a free society we can't ever allow mere words to hurt us.

My wise friend is right. If we don't talk about the many concerns we share with non-libertarians, we make it harder to win them over. We sound like cold, hard people lacking concern for our fellow men. It's not enough to say the lady in the niqab is entitled to wear it. We also need to say that, like our fellow citizens, some of us at least feel sorry for her and disgusted by the misogyny her garb represents.

In modern Britain, libertarians inevitably spend most of our time arguing against the increasing intrusion of the state into private lives. We need also to make clear that we only do so as a matter of ethical principle. It's not because we approve of whatever "evil" the state pretends it is trying to cure. We would oppose a hijab banà la française in England for example, but that doesn't mean any or all of us are happy for the women concerned. Just because we claim no right to interfere doesn't mean we lack a moral response.

Perhaps the confusion arises from the fact that, in a radically statist society like ours, where government accepts no boundaries on its right to interfere, moral criticism is almost always the precursor to an attack on liberty. We used to separate the immoral (to be avoided in oneself and discouraged in others on ethical grounds) and the illegal (to be suppressed for the protection of others from genuine harm). That distinction has somehow been lost.

The loss is no accident, in my view. To advance their cause, statists have - in a cynical agitprop exercise - sought out "oppressed" groups and offered them the state's protection. They have given the right to those favoured groups (selected for the sympathy they evoke in a population of generally decent people) not to be offended and not to have hatred expressed against them. In doing so they have chilled free expression so effectively that it's hard not to imagine that was their objective. And they have caused a clamour from other groups to be added to the list of the elect.

The British media demonised the Polish and Ukrainian peoples as racist bigots in advance of UEFA 2012, for example. I am familiar with both countries and don't believe racism is more prevalent there than here. I simply think we have suppressed its expression here and in doing so may even have increased its incidence. Does that really make anyone's life better? Does it increase the chance of different communities growing together; learning to understand each others' concerns and to build trust? I think not.

The lady on the platform today may, as most human communication is non-verbal, have detected my unease. She may speculate as to its causes but she will never know the truth. Unless it's possible to talk openly to each other, how can we progress? How can we explain to those who are taught to assume we are hostile by our racist, sexist, homophobic and islamophobic natures, that we stand by the old English principle of "handsome is as handsome does?" That we really just want people to stop calling for us to be controlled like dangerous dogs and for all of us - citizen familes old and new - to sign up to the standards of tolerance and mutual respect that we think should define our society?

The key question is, as always, cui bono? I don't think it's the young lady in the niqab, who might well enjoy having me as a neighbour if not taught to fear me. I don't think it's the black and brown football fans who missed out on two wonderful countries. The only beneficiaries of this moral panic agitprop are those who seek ever more control over our lives. Every time we edit our speech for fear of PC "offence" we are losing the battle for our freedom.

Tuesday, June 19, 2012

I am on the road today, visiting the old haunts of the original and best Tom Paine. I am unlikely to post anything substantial, so I merely recommend you to the linked article described by Cafe Hayek as "The greatest blog post ever written". Almost as much as the post itself, I enjoyed the debate in the comments and particularly this observation by one Terry Mcintyre;

It is not enough to point to "market failure" - the proposed solution must actually be an improvement; it is not logically permissible to wave a wand and say "a miracle happens, and a politician emits the Perfect Solution which Fixes Everything."

Monday, June 18, 2012

There was a moving article by auther Louis de Bernieres in The Telegraph for Fathers' Day yesterday. He condemns as "the biggest social scandal of our time" the way the family courts treat fathers and "the cruelty to which they and their children are routinely subjected." If it were not for the fact that a friend of mine is going through a divorce at present, I would have dismissed it as hyperbole. Sadly, it is soberly factual.

There seems to be a mad "women's studies" presumption in our modern system of family justice that women are all victims and all men aggressors. That mothers are saints and fathers sinners. That's not so surprising once you realise that social workers matter far more in the process now than judges. If you are unfortunate enough to go through a divorce, you will be lucky to see the same judge twice. As they dip in and out to suit court schedules they have to rely heavily on the social worker's reports rather than their own wisdom and judgement of the case and the parties. The results are really quite horrifying.

de Bernieres puts his finger on the root of this injustice when he writes;

Mr Cameron, I condemn feckless fathers as strongly as you do, but you appear unaware that by far the majority of relationships involving children are dissolved by mothers. A statistic I have read recently stated that it is 83 per cent. I look forward to your article next Mother’s Day.

And why would that be? Perhaps because women are so advantaged by the system that they do not face the consequences of their actions? They don't have to consider, as men do, that if they break up the marriage, they will almost certainly lose their children. They don't have to consider the financial consequences either, as those are mostly visited on the father. Nor do they suffer any opprobrium for depriving their children of the now much undervalued benefit of a father.

Justice can only be done at the individual level, case by sad case. The full spectrum of good and evil can be found in both sexes as it can in all classes, races and social groups. Whenever "social justice" - i.e. justice at the collective level based on assumptions as to the relative merits of groups - is attempted, it results in far worse ills than those it seeks to cure.

Have a thought for the lost fathers of Britain at their work today, saddened by bitter thoughts of how their Father's Day should have been.